Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships.

The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime. This volume caters to a wide readership, including anyone interested in the classical tradition, Fascism, Nazism, totalitarian culture and aesthetics, or in twentieth-century history more generally.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

List of IllustrationsNotes on Contributors

Introduction

“Distant Models”? Italian Fascism, National Socialism and the Lure of the ClassicsHelen Roche

Part I: People

The Aryans: Ideology and Historiographical Narrative Types in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth CenturiesFelix Wiedemann